Then again Roy Williams may not be as antiquarian as that sounds. In recent years Carolina has copped a page from Bo Ryan, and this season the team’s posting its lowest turnover percentage (15.5) ever in ACC play under Williams. That plus garden-variety beastly offensive rebounding — par for the course in Chapel Hill — means the Heels attempt a tremendous number of shots (which, indeed, tend to be of the two-point jumper variety).

Kentucky is working this same angle in 2016. It’s hardly news that programs like UK and UNC are excellent at offensive rebounding, but what’s changing is the willingness and ability of elite teams to bring their turnover rates down to the same level as all those plucky yet disciplined underdogs they’re always trampling underfoot. Taking care of the ball and rebounding your misses is a good way to safely navigate your way around an off night on the perimeter.

Years ago I referred to this combination of voluminous offensive rebounding and scarce turnovers as a team’s barrage factor. Today I’ve decided that’s a dumb name. Now I much prefer “shot volume,” and to measure it I’ve come up with what I call the Easy Shot Volume Solver. (What a great idea!) ESVS is simply a team’s offensive rebound percentage added to its percentage of effective (turnover-less) possessions in conference play.

For instance North Carolina’s pulling down 38.9 percent of its misses in ACC play, and holding onto the ball 84.3 percent of the time. The sum of those two numbers is 123.2.

The ESVS rankings for all 75 major-conference teams are posted below, but your top 10 looks like this:

The ACC does this whole shot volume thing quite well. NC State and Pitt do so primarily by crashing their offensive glass. Notre Dame and Georgia Tech get the job done by never committing turnovers. And Carolina is the best combination of all of the above.

Or consider Tom Izzo’s team. When you combine 46 percent three-point shooting with a very high number of shots, you have one scary offense. People can fret all they want about what will happen to the Spartans “if the threes don’t fall.” For my part I don’t see that as being an insuperable obstacle for MSU.

Looking at the other end of the spectrum, not every great offense generates a high volume of shots. Kansas and Duke, for example, look pretty vanilla in terms of volume, but the true outlier in this discussion is plainly Iowa State.

The Cyclones clearly have an outstanding offense (No. 1 in Big 12 play, at 1.14 points per trip), yet they rank No. 53 out of 75 major-conference teams in terms of shot volume. This is primarily due to poor offensive rebounding which, in ISU’s case, appears to be purely a function of ineptitude and not volition. (Iowa State is equally awful on the defensive glass.) Feel free to draw one or both of two mutually compatible conclusions. If Steve Prohm’s guys ever pull down a few misses, this offense will be unstoppable; if the Cyclones’ shots don’t fall, they’ll be at a loss for Plan B.